I have been reading and loving so many great online articles lately. No theme really, I've been all over the place. Here's a taste of just where my head (and mouse) have been at.

On the pursuit of perfect bodies:

"I don't have a perfect body. I have cellulite; I will always have cellulite.

Certainly there are mornings that I wake and wish I wasn't five foot, ten. And certainly there are mornings I wish I knew what it was to be blond with thinner hips and perkier boobs. But usually I'm also wondering what it would be to have a perkier attitude. (perk, as it turns out, is not my thing).

I lost years of my life to wanting to lose weight.

And then, not too terribly long ago, I realized that the desire to change my body was the least interesting thing about me.

(that desire is in fact the least interesting thing about every woman I know)."

"As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other... This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college.

External factors are not the only hurdle. After 30, people often experience internal shifts in how they approach friendship... You become pickier about whom you surround yourself with. Manipulators, drama queens, egomaniacs: a lot of them just no longer make the cut.

“I haven’t really changed my standards for what it means to actually be friends,” he concluded. “It’s just that I use the word ‘friends’ more loosely. Making the real kind, the brother kind, is much harder now.”

In that spirit, I recently called Brian. We joked about our inability to find time to hang out, and made a dinner date at the next available opening.

"It turns out there is a measurable connection between income and happiness; not surprisingly, people with a comfortable living standard are happier than people living in poverty.

The catch is that additional income doesn’t buy us any additional happiness on a typical day once we reach that comfortable standard.

Interestingly, and usefully, it turns out that what we do with our money plays a far more important role than how much money we make.

We usually think of having more money as allowing us to buy more and more of the stuff we like for ourselves, from bigger houses to fancier cars to better wine to more finely pixilated televisions. But these typical spending tendencies — buying more, and buying for ourselves — are ineffective at turning money into happiness.

A decade of research has demonstrated that if you insist on spending money on yourself, you should shift from buying stuff (TVs and cars) to experiences (trips and special evenings out). Our own recent research shows that in addition to buying more experiences, you’re better served in many cases by simply buying less — and buying for others.

But research also shows that underindulgence — indulging a little less than you usually do — holds one key to getting more happiness for your money.

Underindulging — temporarily giving up chocolate, even when we have the cash to buy all we want — can renew our enjoyment of the things we love."